Canada at 150: The country is crippled, Newfoundland’s rebels say

Greg Malone has some choice words for Confederation, and few are polite enough to publish. About the only one that’s fit to print is “crippled.”

The Newfoundland author, and former CODCO comedy star, says the country he once entertained on television – with his hilarious impersonations of the Queen and CBC host Barbara Frum – is a “crippled nation” in need of a new beginning.

“Central Canada never had any vision to build up the East Coast any more than they did the West,” he says. “People in the West had to barge and storm their way in when they had enough economic clout to do so.

“The only paradigm for Canada was: take the resources from the regions and build up the heartland. That’s not good enough. We need a different kind of Confederation where everyone feels genuinely equal and genuinely committed to it, and then I think we’d have some kind of country to work with.”

Malone is the latest torch bearer of Newfoundland nationalism, thanks to his new, bestselling book about how his province was, he says, “fraudulently” brought into Canada against its will.

He is a potent reminder that separatist fires still smoulder not only in Quebec, but in English-speaking Canada too.

As the country begins preparing for its 150th birthday celebrations five years from now, it’s worth remembering that not everyone will be joining the party. There were crowds of anti-Confederates in English Canada back in 1867, and there remain pockets of them today, convinced that Canada hasn’t been good for all of its parts and peoples.

Although the idea of Canada was “born,” historians say, at the Charlottetown Conference in 1864, the notion was vehemently opposed at the time by many in the self-governing Atlantic colonies – where strains of anti-Confederate sentiment have never been fully snuffed out.

Nova Scotia’s most revered historical figure, journalist and politician Joseph Howe, campaigned against Confederation in the 1860s and tried to have the British North America Act repealed in Westminster after it was passed. He is remembered today by a prominent statue on the grounds of the provincial legislature.

Prince Edward Island actually rejected Confederation at first, only joining Canada six years later, thanks in part to the steep debts it incurred during the 1870s in the construction of an Island railway that its government couldn’t afford.

Although Islanders accepted the loss of their independence, resentments lingered – so much that in 1973, as the province was officially celebrating the 100th anniversary of its union with Canada, a pair of university students won the hearts of Islanders when they organized a year-long campaign of anti-Confederate stunts.

Harry Baglole and David Weale were students at the University of Price Edward Island, who wanted to remind their province that Confederation wasn’t all it had been cracked up to be.

They formed a movement called the Brothers and Sisters of Cornelius Howatt – named after a 19th century Island politician who had fought to keep PEI independent – and they launched a series of actions to poke fun at Confederation. They wrote letters to local newspapers, draped the door of the legislature in black crepe, and installed an outhouse on the grounds of Province House, as a polling booth for a mock plebiscite on whether P.E.I. should remain in Canada.

Their antics made them media superstars on P.E.I. and vaulted the two students into Time magazine.

“We got a lot of attention,” says Baglole, now a retired publisher and historian. “I’ve never had so much attention since, I must say.

“We had a sense, growing up, that P.E.I. was a poor place and a have-not province,” he says. “It was as if our history only began with Confederation. And we wanted to make the point that in fact, we had a proud, prosperous and independent history before Confederation.

“We had been self-reliant, we didn’t have any handout payments from Ottawa. And based on shipbuilding and farming and other industries, we did very well as a self-governing colony.”

Baglole, who later led the public campaign against the construction of the Confederation Bridge, says he’s no separatist. Nor, he says, is there any real desire for independence among Islanders today.

But there is disillusion, even resentment. Baglole says Canada hasn’t been an entirely good thing for his beloved province, because he says Confederation sapped its entrepreneurial spirit and turned the Island into a welfare case.

“Small island jurisdictions around the world – there are many examples much smaller than ours – can succeed,” he says. “We were once a world leader in high-quality seed potatoes and in silver fox furs. We sold our niche products at a premium. Now we try, and fail, to compete in the commodity market for French fries.

“If you use your jurisdiction skilfully and imaginatively, you can be successful. But our governments have only used it as a way to get more money out of Ottawa.”

While there is disappointment in Confederation in P.E.I., there is palpable anger in parts of Newfoundland and Labrador, and its latest manifestation is Greg Malone’s new book Don’t Tell the Newfoundlanders.

The book, which sold out quickly in Newfoundland and had to be reprinted, details the history of the province’s entry into Confederation in 1949. It breathes new life into a long-held suspicion among many Newfoundlanders that their “country” was illegally made part of Canada against the wishes of its people, by a secret British-Canadian conspiracy.

It’s been known for years, through archival documents, that British and Canadian officials did quietly conspire to manipulate both political negotiations, and public opinion, to bring about union between Newfoundland and Canada. What Malone argues – but what the evidence fails to show – is that there was actual, criminal, vote-rigging by the pro-Confederation side in the 1948 referendum that approved union by a narrow 52 per cent.

Either way, Malone says he hopes the book will psychologically “liberate” Newfoundlanders from what he calls the “negative propaganda” heaped on its people since 1949: that Canada was the financial saviour of a pauper province – “all set up to make Canada look good and cover the smell of what it was really doing.”

Malone is the latest in a long line of activists to argue that Newfoundlanders governed their own territory for 100 years before joining Canada, and should consider doing so again, especially now that the province has the oil wealth to make its economy tick.

“Now that we’re rolling in the cash it may be time to consider breaking away from the country of Canada,” wrote Ryan Cleary, former editor of the Independent, a St. John’s newspaper, in 2008. Cleary is now an NDP MP.

Jeff Webb, a pro-Confederation history professor at Memorial University, says strains of separatist thinking in Newfoundland have evolved over the decades. After 1949 they were fuelled by a sense of betrayal among those who’d once lived in an independent Newfoundland, who believed that union with Canada was brought about undemocratically and should be overturned. Those advocates are now mostly gone.

The postwar generation, says Webb, was motivated less by anger at Confederation itself than by its experience being treated as second-class citizens within Canada.

“I went to university in New Brunswick,” he says, “and I was regularly reminded that I was stupider than the other students. I regularly had people say things to me like, ‘Oh you’re from Newfoundland, perform like a buffoon for me.’ Or, ‘It must be such a big adjustment for you to be living on the mainland.’

“For many in my generation, part of our nationalism was not political, it was wanting respect, feeling that we were being discriminated against.”

But Webb says the newest generation of young adults in Newfoundland has little sense of betrayal or victimhood, having experienced neither the union debates of the 1940s, nor the trauma of the fishery collapse, nor much old-fashioned “Newfie” stereotyping.

“Most of my students, they were born after the cod moratorium in 1992,” he says. “And they’ve got no real emotional attachment to this kind of older, anti-Confederation rhetoric that is as remote from their daily lives as would be, say, the Second World War.

“These students are all on the Internet, all on Facebook. They are a generation whose mental world is not local, but global.”

But Malone insists there is still deep-seated disenchantment with Canada among the people of Newfoundland and Labrador.

“It’s half and half,” he says. “Not all are separatists, but there’s an awful lot of people who would seriously consider it. For many Newfoundlanders, our nationalism is more cultural than political. But it could turn at any moment.”